Nothing worked on or sinister. We have no idea why this happens to some people still, except that in some cases it's related to running ad blockers. We're not intentionally redirecting anyone, that's for sure.

Adblockers! The universal malady. The universal cure-all. Why, it must be the dreaded ARS. (Adblocker Revulsion Syndrome)

But no, there was no adblocking programs, extensions, noscript or any of that stuff involved. Just a plain old default Firefox 11. I wish I had checked it with IE, Chrome and Opera, but that other linked thread seems to suggest the browser doesn't matter.

Anyway, it only lasted for a couple of hours and then went away as if nothing had ever happened.

I have no idea why it does this, it probably has nothing to do with the error, and I forgot the technical reason for it, but the other browsers do not have a "loopy" TCP connection with the localhost like this. Or at least not one that's visible in the endpoint viewer.

I abused my admin rights and logged onto the DNS server for that network and deleted the cached arstechnica.com record, then flushed client DNS cache, and STILL the site resolved to 127.0.0.1 in the IE9 browser.

When I pinged arstechnica.com (on the same box!) it resolved to 75.102.3.15. So not a DNS issue.

My spidey sense sez this is an issue with a server-side HTTP proxy. Maybe a load balancer???

I got on an entirely different network to post this. I still can't open the site from my regular machine.